![]() ![]() Yeah, the whole image is about half a degree on a side, about as big as the full Moon on the sky. Magee (University of California, Santa Cruz) Moon Image: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center and Arizona State University Credit: Hubble Legacy Field Image: NASA, ESA, and G. The footprint of the Hubble Legacy Field on the sky compared to the full Moon. So how much of the sky does it cover? This much: Incidentally, even that's not the whole thing. ![]() The image displayed here is only 2,000 pixels wide, I had to shrink the massive original 20,791 x 19,201 pixel image by a factor of ten to get it to fit here - plus uploading a 118 megabyte image would bring down the wrath of my editors! But you can download it directly yourself if you'd like. Astronomers will be doing precisely this to the galaxies seen here, so that they can be studied better. ![]() Taking spectra (breaking their light up into thousands of individual colors) can reveal their distance directly, too. There are ways to discern the two for example examining the colors of the galaxies can reveal if they are small and close or big and far away. It's difficult to distinguish this from just looking at the image. Mind you, some of those smaller, point-like galaxies may actually be closer to us and physically small, or they may be monsters seen from across the Universe. Oesch (University of Geneva), and the Hubble Legacy Field team. Magee (University of California, Santa Cruz), K. Literally, the light from them had been traveling for over 13 billion years, 96% the age of the Universe, before finishing their journey at Hubble's mirror.ĭetail of the Hubble Deep Field shown at nearly full resolution. I'd guess that most are at least a billion light years away, and some are up to 13.3 billion light years distant: So far away that we see them as they were not long after the first stars formed in them after the Big Bang! The galaxies in this image are very far indeed. In that case, the stars in the image are like dust specks on the window you can see things far, far beyond. We can see past those into intergalactic space, like being inside a house and looking out the window to houses beyond. To set the stage: We are inside the Milky Way galaxy, which is filled with stars. It's filled with galaxies! The vast majority of objects you see here are galaxies only a handful are stars in our own galaxy *. The Hubble Legacy Field, a deep image of the sky made up of over 7,500 observations. A much, much wider section.Īnd that, my friends, is why we now have this: The incredible Hubble Legacy Field, which is, quite simply, jaw-dropping. The obvious next step is to widen the view, and map a larger section of the sky. So how do you follow up on that? Well, all these images are of a relatively small area of the sky you could easily block them with the tip of a pencil held at arm's length. That was followed in turn by the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, an observation that totals over one million seconds. It was followed up with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which took a longer exposure and probed more deeply into the Universe. The image created from this idea was the Hubble Deep Field, an iconic shot that contained thousands of galaxies. It hangs on a simple idea: What if we point this powerful observatory at one small spot in space, someplace that appears relatively empty, and let it just accumulate light for hours, days, weeks? What will we see? Of all the kinds of observations it's taken, one of the most profound is also one of the most subtle. It has shown us planets, moons, star clusters, nebulae, galaxies… so many spectacular, gorgeous and scientifically rich images that astronomers will investigate them for decades to come. Over the years, the Hubble Space Telescope has astonished us over and again. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |